Sections

Welcome to the international ESM Handbook

iESM - the Global Rail Industry's good practice guide to safety management for engineering and technology.

New Application notes available now. To support the existing AN6 on Maintenance a comprehensive audit checklist has been produced as an appendix. This checklist is designed to help people who are using AN 6 by presenting the main points of the existing guidance in a checklist format. You can use the audit checklist to assess existing maintenance arrangements or arrangements that you plan to put in place and how best to interpret each checklist item in your own particular context. In responses to requests a good practice example has been developed to support AN8 to show two methods that have been used successfully to derive SIL for safety functions. Finally AN10 reviews EN50128 design activities and general principles and links them to the specification and design activities of HDL generated code for gate array applications. These are popular in railway applications but there is limited guidance in assuring their safety. We welcome suggests for future areas of guidance. Get the application note downloads here.

The iESM Working Group, with the support of MTRCL and TPD Group are pleased to publish updated Guidance in Volume 1 and Volume 2 for Projects to help users apply Engineering Safety Management it to their own situations. There are many minor updates based on feedback received. The main changes is to reflect the latest CENELEC EN standards (also published as ISOs) EN 50126:2017 parts 1 and 2, prEN 50129:2016 and EN50567. iESM Guidance is not intended to be a commentary on those standards but it is important that we continue to reflect emerging practice. iESM continues to offer practical “battle-proven” ways of delivering work safely. It should provide a way of complying with CENELEC requirements but covers wider areas that we think are important, such as safety culture, where those standards are silent. See more here.

Developed, published and launched in Hong Kong on 11th April 2013, by the Technical Programme Delivery Group (www.tpd.uk.com), the primary purpose of iESM is to help railway professionals involved in transportation engineering make sure that their work contributes to improved safety and to enable engineering changes to be accepted more readily.

iESM does this by providing guidance on the principles of international good practice in Engineering Safety Management (ESM) by clearly outlining the activities involved in making a system or product safe and providing the evidence that it is safe.

iESM has been written principally for people around the world who work in the rail industry and use their judgement to take or review decisions that affect railway safety. However its underlying principles and techniques can be applied to other Transportation sectors with the necessary interpretation and adaptation to meet any industry specific requirements.

It is designed to help decision makers exercise their judgement in a systematic, efficient and informed manner. It also provides detailed guidance on how to produce evidence that helps justify why these decisions were taken. These people include executives, managers, engineers, operators and maintainers within transportation organizations and their supply chain.

The iESM guidance has been to include the use of standards and reference systems as means of demonstrating safety. So not only is it a way of complying with the European Common Safety Method, but more importantly, it allows a single safety framework to include the more mature branches of engineering such as civil engineering where greater reliance is often placed on standards. The iESM Handbook also has considerable experience-based guidance on Cross Acceptance.

Volumes 0, 1 and 2 of iESM are currently freely fully downloadable from this website (Volume 0 is available in several languages) and to help supplement the handbook, we offer a range of different iESM training modules for iESM users.

If you require further information or have any queries in relation to iESM please email us at: info@intesm.org and we will respond to you as soon as we can.